Haruki Murakami Quotes
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This is what it means to live on. When granted hope, a person uses it as fuel, as a guidepost to life. It is impossible to live without hope.
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If you miss the bus, miss the train, you’d be left behind. So everyone says, let’s get on the train, let’s get on the bus and go faster and get rich... I just didn’t like that kind of lifestyle. I love to read books, to listen to music.
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Exhaustion pays no mind to age or beauty. Like rain and earthquakes and hail and floods.
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It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
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Nothing in the real world is as beautiful as the illusions of a person about to lose consciousness.
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Sometimes I feel so- I don’t know - lonely. The kind of helpless feeling when everything you’re used to has been ripped away. Like there’s no more gravity, and I’m left to drift in outer space with no idea where I’m going’ Like a little lost Sputnik?’ I guess so.
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As if to build a fence around the fatal emptiness inside her, she had to create a sunny person that she became. But if you peeled away the ornamental egos that she had built, there was only an abbys of nothingness and the intense thirst that came with it. Though she tried to forget it, the nothingness would visit her periodically - on a lonely rainy afternoon, or at dawn when she woke up from a nightmare. What she needed at such times was to be held by someone, anyone.
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This was never any place I was meant to be. This isn’t a place for me.
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The strength I'm looking for isn't the type where you win or lose. I'm not after a wall that'll repel power coming from outside. What I want us the kind of strength to be able to absorb that kind of power, to stand up to it.The strength to quietly endure things - unfairness, misfortunes, sadness, mistakes, misunderstandings.
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This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: At the time, no one knew what was coming.
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That’s how stories happen — with a turning point, an unexpected twist. There’s only one kind of happiness, but misfortune comes in all shapes and sizes. It’s like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.
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You couldn’t begin to imagine who I am, where I’m going, or what I’m about to do, All of you are trapped here. You can’t go anywhere, forward or back. But I’m not like you. I have work to do. I have a mission to accomplish. And so, with your permission, I shall move ahead.
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A friend to kill time is a friend sublime.
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Understanding' is merely the sum total of our misunderstandings.
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I'd be smiling and chatting away, and my mind would be floating around somewhere else, like a balloon with a broken string.
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Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from.
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I used to think the years would go by in order, that you get older one year at a time. But it's not like that. It happens overnight.
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Of course you keep telling yourself there's something to be learned from everything, and growing old shouldn't be that hard. That's the general drift.
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Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.
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Say it before you run out of time. Say it before it's too late. Say what you're feeling. Waiting is a mistake.
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Sometimes it's not the people who change, it's the mask that falls off.
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Even if there were two of me, I still couldn't do all that has to be done. No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I'm not going to lay off or quit just because I'm busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.
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What would tomorrow bring? I wondered. Both hands on the wheel, I closed my eyes. I didn’t feel like I was in my own body; my body was just a lonely, temporary container I happened to be borrowing. What would become of me tomorrow I did not know.
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I'm going to take you out of here ... I'm going to take you home, to the world where you belong, where cats with bent tails live, and there are little backyards, and alarm clocks ring in the morning.